The Football Star's Plus Size Obsession

Chapter 5: Radar

Mia's POV

I know something's off before I even get to my locker Monday morning.

Ines is already waiting there for me, she's got the face she makes when she's trying to figure out how to say something without making it worse.

"What," I say.

"Nothing. It's probably nothing."

"Ines."

She sighs and pulls out her phone, she turns it toward me like she's ripping off a bandage.

It's a post from Madison's account, my name isn't in it, nothing that could get flagged or reported. Just a photo of a library table with three people clearly visible and a fourth mostly cropped out, an arm, a sleeve of the sweater I wore Thursday.

The caption says: some people take "book club" very seriously lol.

There are already over forty comments, I don't read them, I've learned not to.

"It's not even about you," Ines says. It's the kind of thing you say when you're trying to make someone feel better, and both of you know it isn't true.

"Sure."

I close my locker harder than I mean to, the sound echoes down the hallway. A couple people glance over, I hate that too, how even the sound of a locker closing can feel like it's asking for attention I didn't want.

It's a small thing, I keep telling myself walking to first period. A caption, a cropped photo, nothing with my name in it.

But small things from Madison Blake are never actually small, they're never really about the thing itself. They're about making sure you remember your place, quietly, so you never get comfortable enough to forget it.

By lunch, it's turned into something else, that's how these things always go, passed from person to person until it barely looks like what started it.

Somebody tells somebody that I have a crush on Dylan, I don't know where it came from. I've never said it out loud to anyone except Ines, and Ines would never say a word, she's the one person here I trust completely.

But there it is anyway, whispered near enough for me to catch it walking past a table I don't belong to. Two girls I don't even know are laughing about something, and one of them says my name and Dylan's in the same breath, like it's a joke I'm not in on.

I don't say anything about it, I've learned that saying something just gives it more air, more reasons to keep going around. So instead I do what I always do, I get quiet, I get smaller, I eat lunch fast and leave before the bell so I'm not caught in the crowd heading the same way I am.

Ines finds me by the science hallway, she's out of breath, like she jogged to catch up.

"Okay, so, I asked around."

"Please tell me you didn't ask anyone directly."

"I have some pride left, I was careful." She glances around like the hallway itself might be listening, which, at this school, isn't as crazy as it sounds. "I think it started with Brooke."

"Brooke Ellison?"

"She was in your group, right? For the project?"

I think back to the library, to Brooke's thumb never quite leaving her phone screen, to the way she seemed to be somewhere else even while sitting right there at the table.

I never said anything about Dylan in front of her, I'm almost sure of that, I've spent three years being careful about exactly that kind of thing.

"I never said anything," I say, mostly to myself.

"Maybe you didn't have to, maybe she just noticed."

That's almost worse, the idea that I didn't even get to keep the secret through my own mistake, that it slipped out through nothing at all, just from existing near the wrong person at the wrong time.

I think about all those recordings on Brooke's phone, all those small moments she catches without anyone really noticing she's doing it. A cold feeling moves through me that I don't have a name for yet.

"It doesn't matter how it got out," I say, mostly trying to convince myself. "It's not true. I mean, it doesn't matter."

Ines gives me a look that says she's not buying the second half of that sentence any more than I am. She doesn't push it though because she knows me well enough to know when pushing just makes things worse.

The rest of the day passes in that low hum of being talked about without being talked to, It's tiring in its own way, nobody says anything straight to my face, that's not how it works here. It just moves around me, above me, through the spaces I'm standing in, and I'm left to piece together whatever version of it reaches me secondhand.

I don't see Dylan until the end of the day, he's crossing the parking lot toward his truck, and Madison's already leaning against the passenger door, waiting for him and something in the set of her shoulders makes it clear she's heard the same thing everyone else has.

She doesn't look at me, she doesn't have to, her whole body is a message aimed in my direction, cool and territorial.

Dylan glances over just before he gets in the truck, just a flicker, there and gone but it's enough to make my chest do that same unsteady thing it's been doing more and more lately.

I hate how much that one small glance manages to outweigh a whole day of whispers.

I walk home instead of waiting for the bus, I need the extra twenty minutes to put myself back together before I have to be a person again at dinner.

Somewhere around the corner of Maple and Ninth, I find myself wondering, for the first time, if the version of this story where I stay small and careful forever is one I actually want to keep living in.

It's just a thought, I don't know what to do with it yet but it's there now, quiet and stubborn, refusing to leave the way most of my thoughts usually do.